Roadmap

Completed baseline

Step 1: deterministic foundation

• C23/C++23 build system, strict warnings and sanitizers;
• arenas, canonical byte codecs and deterministic fixed-point arithmetic;
• SHA-256/HMAC/HKDF/Merkle and explicit development crypto;
• PoTB scoring, committee selection, epoch seed and rewards.

Step 2: Astrolune v1 core

• two-level depth-256 content-addressed sparse Merkle state;
• immutable contract code, staged roots, snapshots and storage deposits;
• canonical ALVM v1 container, CFG validation and 64-bit interpreter;
• synchronous host/contract calls, rollback and no-reentry enforcement;
• typed/versioned transactions, resource caps, expiry and receipts/events;
• vector base fee, burned base charge and PoTB 60/25/15 tip;
• canonical genesis/block body and atomic commitment-checking executor;
• PoTB native schemas and reserved system-state bridge;
• ABI manifest/layout enforcement, multi-toolchain CI, fuzz targets and a deterministic cross-toolchain block fixture.

Next engineering milestones

1. Complete the production cryptography migration. The optional libsodium Ed25519 signature path and RFC 8032 vectors are implemented; production packaging, ECVRF and the VDF-or-no-VDF decision remain.
2. Extend durable storage. The content-addressed state backend, canonical block log and crash-tail recovery are implemented; pruning, snapshot import/export and canonical-chain rewind remain.
3. Benchmark opcode, host, storage and block execution on the minimum validator hardware, then publish production genesis limits/prices.
4. Harden the network layer. The transport now carries handshakes bound to the genesis hash, transaction/block gossip with dedup, and range-based catch-up sync; peer discovery, transport encryption, rate-limiting policy and committee-authorised proposal/finality remain.
5. Complete the evidence validation behind PoTB-native operations without guessing unresolved correlation/ASN policy.
6. Build Trocto/Regol tooling and contract SDK against the frozen ALVM v1 container. The v0.2 compiler is in place (both tiers, constructors, expanded maps, string literals, assert, import validation); function linking for imports, generics and the module system remain.
7. Add applications and operational tooling only after the node and production crypto boundaries are complete.

Continuous gates

Every protocol change must keep:

• standalone public-header C++ compilation;
• C/C++ layout contract and AL_PUBLIC manifest equality;
• GCC, Clang and MSVC strict builds;
• Clang ASan/UBSan and MSVC ASan;
• all behavioral and corpus CTests;
• short decoder fuzz smoke runs;
• one identical determinism digest across all three toolchains.

Long-running fuzz campaigns and performance calibration are release activities, not substitutes for the short gates above.